That’s the sound of Steve Ballmer throwing chairs around his office again.
DVD format war appears to be over
Now, the interesting thing is that this is *so* obvious that even Rob Enderle manages to mostly get it. However, all these analysts who’re braying about how it’s too late for either platform because of digital download are morons. They’re just being contrary to attempt to look insightful and forward thinking. While I think there’s a model for digital download of video, I’m not at all convinced that it will replace high def video in the hearts and minds of serious technophiles. I mean, do you have any IDEA how large a high definition movie is? And there is a lot of value add to be considered in a DVD/Blu-Ray. Commentaries, documentaries, etc.
It’s rather telling that even though Apple’s doing very well with TV episodes on the iTMS, movies have been substantially less popular. TV episodes are smaller in size, and therefore require less bandwidth to download in a reasonable time than standard rez movies. HD movies are much MUCH larger than regular movies. So if there’s not enough bandwith to make standard res movies, where’s all this room over the tubes going to come from for HD movies?
I just don’t think that the market is there for this yet, not for the HD aficionado. certainly not for downloading movies in 1080p. And the same people that you’re counting on to be the ‘bleeding edge’ adopters are EXACTLY the same people that will care about the difference between 720p and 1080p. And they’ll care about things like commentary tracks, extra goodies, etc. And those things take space. Lots of it. It’s likely going to result in the distribution of digital ‘disc images’ that are *huge*, in order to allow you to add commentary tracks to the main film. And I also don’t see the MPAA cartel EVER willingly embracing a model that lets the user have exactly what they want without paying the massive markup required for getting a license tied to physical media. Not for the high-end market, anyway.
I don’t see digital download replacing Blu-Ray as a viable distribution model for the über-technocrat anytime in the near future.
Enderle, as usual, is just trying to look insightful. And showing his true colors as just another mouth-breathing ‘analyst’ trying desperately to make people think he’s hip in the process.
